Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 2008 New Year’s speech was an optimistic reminder that Germany in 2007 had seen economic improvement and that 2008 was promising a continuation of this trend. Internal political strife, increased violence among teenagers, and the international credit crunch were counterbalanced by further decreases in unemployment, an expansion of early-education programs, and a serious step forward in alleviating cross-border tax evasion.

Domestic Affairs

Domestic events in early 2008 shocked many Germans as the year began with reports of a retiree admitted to the hospital because of an unprovoked attack by a group of teenagers. This alleged incident was a continuation of events that occurred in late 2007; in general, the past two years had seen six instances across Germany in which groups of teenagers committed random violent acts on people walking on the street or in parks at unusual hours. This left many people reconsidering for the first time their understanding of physical safety in modern Germany.

In the political arena these occurrences fed into the identity crisis of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which had already faced problems in 2007 related to redefining the party’s conservative agenda and uniting voters and party members under the same umbrella in respect to terrorism and domestic security. The apparent willingness of groups of teenagers to commit acts of violence as a recreational activity induced Minister for the Interior Wolfgang Schäuble of the CDU to call for tougher jail sentences. The debate reached monumental dimensions in those states with elections in 2008: Hessen, Bavaria, and Lower Saxony. Even within the CDU there was dissent, as many members agreed with the opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD) that instead of harsher prison sentences, there was a need for intervention before a teenager became violent. The debate was not helped by police and social service workers who opposed any attempts to increase prison sentences for teenagers. Statistically, they argued, the number of violent acts committed by teenagers was on the decrease, though the individual acts had become more violent. The fact that violence committed by nonnational teenagers had increased was particularly worrying.

Germans had grappled with integration issues for years, and there was little agreement among the parties in 2008 as a new law that required immigrants to demonstrate that they could speak rudimentary German came into force. Both the new law and the recent increase in violence opened the doors for serious discussions of what integration should mean—a debate that as yet remained without a solution.

This debate caused even more problems for the SPD, which was struggling to redefine its identity within the political spectrum. As the new centre-left party the Left argued that immigrants needed more help and the Christian Democrats demanded more social integration, the Social Democrats seemed to have a hard time defining where their position lay between these two disparate stances. In 2007 the Social Democrats had agreed to a new party program, but they were unable to win any of the state elections in Hessen, Bavaria, and Lower Saxony, while the Left increased its vote totals and won seats in two of the three state parliaments. Embattled SPD leader Kurt Beck suddenly resigned in September and was replaced in October by his predecessor, former vice-chancellor Franz Müntefering. At the same time, it was announced that Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier would stand against the CDU’s Angela Merkel as the SPD’s official candidate for the chancellorship in the 2009 elections to the Bundestag (the lower house of parliament). Although it was believed that the SPD and the Left would work together in coalition should they achieve enough seats in 2009, the two parties were likely to field their own candidates in the presidential campaign to challenge Pres. Horst Köhler of the CDU.

The CDU’s push for an increase in free child-care facilities and the attendant encouragement of fathers to take on more child-care responsibilities (and thus allow mothers to return to work sooner) was going well. An increase in births in 2007 and 2008, the first rise in 10 years, was considered an indication that the policy was working. Other CDU initiatives were less successful. The laws allowing the state to gather data by using private e-mail and phone conversations without actual proof of wrongdoing failed in the Constitutional Court, as did a widespread smoking ban. The use of biometric data on passports and increased rights for police to fight terrorism were expected to be debated in the court over the course of the next year.

The Constitutional Court itself saw a new development in 2008 when, for the first time, a judge appointed to the Constitutional Court, University of Würzburg law professor Horst Dreier of the SPD, publicly failed to garner approval from the other parties. Twice before in German history had a judge failed to achieve acceptance by the opposition, but this was the first time that the debate had been carried out publicly rather then internally between the two main parties in government.

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